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Dropped Call Research To Benefit CRM, NZ-Lucent Team Says

A couple New Zealand researchers are working on solving timeout issues for mobile phones.

Specifically, they hope overloaded cellphone networks and untraced emergency calls from mobile phones could "soon be a thing of the past," according to research being carried out at Auckland University of Technology professors Nik Kasabov and Steve MacDonell.

The two researchers have joined MediaLab, Telecom, Lucent and two other New Zealand universities to look into mobile communications issues including location determination, network optimization and customer relationship management (CRM).

Professor Kasabov says the work being done with Lucent is using AUT's research expertise to "develop and test innovative computational methods and tools which can be applied to improve mobile network performance."

"We focus on the problems of predicting mobile calls traffic density at any geographical location, for minutes, hours and weeks ahead, and on identifying new consumer network usage patterns," Kasabov says. "Having access to large volumes of data will enable us to further explore aspects of both customer and traffic behavior in relation to network activity and to the provision of new mobile services."

The research topics build on work done by Lucent Bell Laboratories technologies, Dynamic Optimization and Per Call Measurement Data (PCMD). Lucent has been performing Dynamic Optimization research in conjunction with Telecom NZ since 2004.

The research project involves a continuous cycle of New Zealand-based testing and analysis, which is fed to the US for further analysis and interpretation at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. It is then fed back to the New Zealand team for more testing and enhancement.

"Dynamic Optimization gives mobile network operators a whole new way to manage the traffic on their network," says Lucent New Zealand general manager Jonathan van Smit. "It allows the network to respond dynamically to changes in when and where people are using the network. For example, when there's a big rugby game or a traffic jam, there are a large number of people using their mobiles in a concentrated area. Until now, mobile networks haven't coped very well with this."

With Dynamic Optimization, networks can "borrow" unused capacity from areas where it isn't currently needed and redirect it to areas of high use, van Smit explains: "It's a completely new approach that results in fewer dropped calls and better service for customers."